Mornin all - about 2 hours post-dawn as I’ve been balconatin’ since pre-dawn interrupted by phone with friends much of the time.
From last week:
I’ve stayed at a hotel near there many times. Generic corporate suburbia. There’s a big indoor shopping mall not far from there. Not exciting, but plenty safe. As Shoe said last night.
{{Sari}}: I’m sorry you have some miscues in the move. But those are to be expected. It’s good that you’ve got that handyman person who seems to be capable & trustworthy.
As folks have said to Thelma Lou in her thread about moving to a retirement community, you don’t have to do it all the first day. Settling in can take as long as it needs. Ambition in excess of capability followed by collapse seems to be your favored MO. If you stay aware of it you might be better able to avoid it. My late first wife, even when healthy, had the same problem when it came to exercise. She’d get going and wouldn’t stop until she’d hurt herself. Made actual progress difficult.
Don’t do that!
From this week:
Yaay! My late first wife’s hair was Italian very dark brown. Years ago I saw a greeting card she just had to have. So I bought it, wrote some silly ditty inside, and gave it to her. We kept it for years.
The cover art is two slender dark-haired 30-ish women at a curbside café table doing lunch & white wine. Their poses & expressions suggest they’re sharing catty gossip. One of them says “Is it true that blondes have more fun?”
Open the card and it says “Totally. Their attention span is so short everything always seems new and exciting!!”
Are you by any chance blonde? Rowwr!
Yaay! Best news of the thread so far. Congrats and happy dancing.
As to me:
First off, thanks to all for the fine wishes about retirement. I’m excited and honored to join the exclusive club of other MMP drains on society. Makes me wonder who’s next and how soon? I fear there’s nobody else very close. Today has much my usual day-off activities in it, but somehow it feels a bit different.
Yesterday I drove home with the top down, thinking that it would be a hell of a note to crash on the last commute. So I was a bit more careful than usual. Got home intact and Her Ladyship was extra excited to see me & extra affectionate. Yum!!
My usual habit on arrival is first thing to dump out my dirty laundry, put in fresh, reload consumables like pills, and disassemble the accessories off the uniform shirt I’m wearing and install them directly onto a fresh shirt for the next trip. A lot of stuff just stays in my uniform pants pockets for next time or are transferred to new pants if these are soiled enough. Likewise there’s some resetting, reloading, and recharging of consumables in my toolbag. It’s a familiar post-trip ritual like we all have coming home from irk: Keys go here, purse goes there, clothes change thusly … . Mine’s just a bit more involved. At the end of which I’m ready to dash out the door the next time they call, needing only to yank on pre-assembled pants & shirt and grab my two pre-assembled bags. Kinda like a firefighter.
This time none of that was necessary and it was disorienting trying to figure out what to do and what to not. I’m expecting a lot more disorientation over the next week-ish. I settled for removing dirties, replenishing nothing, and doing a dedicated load of all-white laundry for the last time. Lots of stuff is still arranged as if to go again, but I’ll deal with that later. No rush.
Decide to go for casual dinner at the local ramen place. A nice walk in the warmth, some yummy tonkatsu udon for dinner, and a stroll back home as the sun sinks low. New life is starting out good. No different from last week, but utterly different from last week.
And yet the irk saga continues …
Rewinding a couple of hours … As I’m still driving home HQ sends an alert. Not being any more than idly curious what they want, I wait until I’m at a traffic light off the freeway before reading the message. Surprise Surprise! The flight from EWR is now going to be 10 minutes late. It’s still about 3 hours until departure and things are slipping. Our planned connection at the intermediate stop is now down to 25 minutes. Hmmm. I love it when a plan comes together. Or comes apart. 
Over the course of unpacking, yakking with Her Ladyship, getting re-dressed, and going to dinner my phone keeps alerting about every 20 minutes. It got to be a real joke. The flight from EWR keeps slip, slip, slippin’ into the future 10, 15, 20 minutes at a time. One alert was different: HQ had noticed that we’ll miss the connection, so now we’re to lay over there and finish riding home on Mon, leaving around 11am and getting to MIA around 1pm. Just as the FA and I had predicted over breakfast. Of course there was no hotel room set up for that.
By the time I went to bed at 11pm (!) the phone had kept badgering us with breathless coming soon, really!! updates all evening and the 7:30pm flight from EWR still had not departed. But at least the bureaucracy had located me a hotel room there at the stopover. And had noticed that as late as I’d be arriving, the planned late morning ride to MIA would not work; it was too soon and I needed my beauty sleep. So instead I was reset to ride on the later 3pm flight getting to MIA at about 5pm and therefore home around 6:30-7pm given Mon evening rush hour.
I silence my phone and go to bed, sleeping the carefree slumber of somebody who absolutely positively won’t be rousted by HQ to make something happen overnight.
I’m up pre-dawn, get the coffee going, and start my vital balconatin’. First order of business is to find out how I fared last night. Turns out the flight left EWR at midnight-15 and got to the stopover at 2am. I’d have made it to the hotel at 3am, and probably needed an Uber to get there. Having been up since 7:30am on 5-ish hours of sleep. So the poor customers and crew endured 4 hours and 30 minutes of creeping 15-30 minute-at-a-time delays. Talk about world class customer disservice. The frustration level there must have been insane. At least folks from New Joisey are widely renowned for their genteel manners and endless patience. So there’s that.
It’s now 10am and it’ll be another 7 hours before I find out how my last irkday ends up. Good thing I’m not there to experience it except vicariously.
Cheers!! Happy Moanday to all.
I’ll be back later with my leaf-peeper comments.